How do you keep it all straight?

At Microsoft, they utilize their Bing application, Bing Maps, to sort it all out. One of the more interesting demos that I saw this year at the Microsoft Partner Conference was the “context-based search experience” from Bing.  If you have ever searched for something and found plenty of nonsensical results, you appreciate the work that Microsoft is doing to bring some order to searches.  Bing Maps does a great job of understanding all of the complexities of searching and tries to tie in not only what you are looking for, but the context around it.  And that takes a lot of horsepower.

To achieve their objectives for storing and correlating petabytes of information, Microsoft needed a massive number of cores, along with high power efficiency.  In their data center in Colorado, they deployed tens of thousands of AMD Opteron™ processor cores inside Dell Nucleon servers.  While the Nucleon may not seem like a household name, there is a reason for that.  These servers are customized through the Dell Data Center Solutions group, a team of experts who focus on large, scale out data centers and have a particular expertise around very large, dense data center deployments.

These servers delivered the density and most importantly, the power efficiency that Microsoft needed to make their Bing Maps come to life.

One of the most interesting aspects of this deployment is not what was being deployed, but how the servers were deployed.  Dell delivered complete containerized solutions to Microsoft that allowed them to quickly deploy and manage the server farm. The Dell Modular Data Center actually utilizes fans and cooling at the container level versus managing the cooling at a server level.  In the world of homogeneous workloads where thousands of servers are all running the same application, this makes tremendous sense because you scale the workload across nodes, minimizing power and heat fluctuations and allowing you to manage the power and cooling aspects at the container level for much greater efficiency.  Microsoft believes that by doing this, Dell helped them reduce power requirements by as much as 80% while simultaneously delivering up to 5X the compute density.

One of the key components in this solution was the low-power AMD Opteron 4100 Series processor, designed specifically for these environments where density and power efficiency are key.  But with 4 and 6 cores, it is clear that while customers are getting exceptional power efficiency and density, they are not doing so by sacrificing their core density – something that a large scale out data center really demands.

As the world continues to evolve towards the cloud, and these large scale out data centers continue to become more plentiful, we’ll hopefully see more customers opting to deploy the AMD Opteron 4100 Series processors in solutions like the Dell Nucleon server from the Dell Data Center Solutions group.  And that ultimately means clouds with high performance, density and power efficiency.

To me, that sounds like a perfect map to the cloud.  Bing Maps has is all laid out for you.

For more information, you can download the complete case study at: http://content.dell.com/us/en/corp/d/corporate~case-studies~en/Documents~2011-bing-10009998.pdf.aspx

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

It is a big world out there, and DigitalGlobe is out to map it all in amazing detail.

DigitalGlobe is a high resolution earth imagery and geospatial information product provider.  I am guessing that they have more than their fair share of white lab coats as they are not just people who are fascinated by the changes in our earth, but they are also scientists who started the company based on their need for this level of high quality imagery.

This week, at VMworld in Las Vegas,  Jeff Niggemeyer, and Bill Welty of DigitalGlobe,  are presenting some fascinating information about their IT environment and how they can manage huge amounts of data while also trying to meet the needs of researchers and businesses around the world.

Inside of their IT world, you see a host of Dell PowerEdge ™ servers that are being driven by, you guessed it, AMD Opteron™ processors. DigitalGlobe utilizes the AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors inside Dell PowerEdge servers in their HPC and virtualization layers. 

Inside of their business, they look at compute in two very distinct pieces, HPC and virtualization.  Both of these are areas where the AMD Opteron processors deliver great benefits.

The 12 cores of these processors deliver great parallelism across the systems, helping streamline HPC applications.  For HPC, core counts are king. In their world, higher core counts really matter because the core count determines the number of application threads that are hosted per node; ultimately this ties to the number of nodes that need to be deployed.  With high core density per node, fewer nodes need to be deployed in order to handle any particular level of threading.  Fewer nodes help make sure that power-hungry HPC clusters don’t break the bank when it comes to power costs. Today their HPC cluster has thousands of AMD Opteron processor cores and they plan to triple the number  in the next 3 months.  Their current high speed storage is growing rapidly into the pedabyte range and they expect it to grow 10 fold in the next year.”

DigitalGlobe also utilizes virtualization to help simplify the overall IT architecture, and today close to 60% of their servers are virtualized.  They can utilize less hardware, again, which helps minimize not only the management tasks but also drive better overall data center efficiency.  With the high core counts of AMD Opteron 6100 Series processors, DigitalGlobe can not only load more VMs per server, but also align more cores per VM for less overall CPU contention. Their 12 clusters are running VMware ESX and cover Virtual Desktop Infrastructure for client access, as well as the standard production, dev/test and DMZ that you expect in most virtualized data centers.

DigitalGlobe found that AMD processors provide significant benefits compared to other processors considered including reducing the processing time under load, better I/O performance both in IOPS and data transfer, and a reduced impact on the data center, driven in great part by the lower cost per core and the ability to run cooler.

For more information about DigitalGlobe, take a look at their website, especially the sample images: http://www.digitalglobe.com/index.php

And if you are going to be at VMworld, don’t miss their presentation “Journey to the Core with AMD” #SUP1002, Wednesday, August 31st – 1:00 p.m., the imagery is even more fascinating in a large format.

It’s a big world out there, but DigitalGlobe is delivering a high level of imagery that makes it feel just a bit smaller.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

This blade is a great alternative to the traditional server chassis and traditional server infrastructure because it combines some of the best things about AMD Opteron 6000 Series platforms with a 4P capable blade that shatters some of the traditional myths about blade computing.

These new blades deliver core-rich performance and value with up to 64 cores and 32 DIMMs of DDR3 memory for tremendous computational horse-power, and low power consumption for heavy use workloads in exceptionally demanding data-base and virtualized environments. One of the biggest reasons that customers are moving to blades is because of the need to consolidate their IT infrastructure; the physical density that these blades deliver, combined with the density of compute help make these an outstanding choice.

The Dell blade chassis include 10GbE Networking options for maximized throughput. Consolidation of virtualized environments can be greatly enhanced with plenty of I/O bandwidth; not only the 10GbE options help here, but in addition, 1GbE, Fibre Channel, and InfiniBand connectivity options provide a flexible set of chassis outputs that match to your data center strategies.

Building out the rack with blades helps reduce the complexity from the front, but it is all of those different connections that happen on the back side that make a data center administrator’s life easier.  Not only does the aggregation of cabling help the deployment and management, but it also helps to optimize airflow as there are fewer cables in the back of the rack to obstruct the expulsion of hot air from the servers.

When you tie all of this capability together with a chassis-level management, you get an extremely strong enterprise package.  Dell’s M1000e Chassis Management Controller helps administrators keep track of what is going on in their data center, boosting productivity by allowing powerful management capabilities for both densely populated physical and virtual server deployments. And speaking of virtualization, these new servers feature dual Embedded Hypervisors, available on non-volatile memory as well as hot-pluggable hard drives to help ensure uptime for critical virtualized servers.

When it comes to virtualized or even non-virtualized environments, the Dell PowerEdge M915 blade brings 4P performance and huge core counts to your data center in a dense 4P blade that excels in the thing that you really appreciate – making your life easy.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

AMD and Dell offer a wealth of resources to ensure you remain on top of your game when it comes to saving energy, maximizing your server utilization through virtualization, evaluating cloud computing and much more. Here are a few places to make sure you bookmark so they’re close at hand:

• Dell servers powered by AMD processors product page
• AMD Opteron^TM processor-based Dell PowerEdge product page
• AMD at Work blog
• AMDUnprocessed YouTube channel
• Dell YouTube channel

On an ongoing basis, the experts at AMD and Dell contribute tips, tricks, how-to’s, demos and other interesting insight into the latest trends and topics relevant to your work in IT. If you ever find yourself scrambling and on the defensive, we will do our best to help you formulate a game plan and get back on track.

As Armando Acosta at Dell said best, building a great team is about hard work. Becoming a champion is the just beginning. We hope we can make the hard work a little bit easier.

Jeff Jones is a Global Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

In Dell’s server roster there is one such player, its name is the Dell PowerEdge C5125 shared infrastructure server.  This server just came on to the team’s bench and it has an interesting set of stats to be sure.  As this tailor made server does its shoot around warm-ups for its entry into the market, let me give you some of its exciting stats. 

From the beginning it is clear that this server is different.  While some servers are about brute force and are happy to push around the competition in the lane (see the Dell PowerEdge C6145 loaded with the AMD Opteron™ 6000 Series Platform), its teammate, the PowerEdge C5125, outsmarts the competition in other ways.  The Dell PowerEdge C5125 keeps its density in its 12 independent servers loaded into a 3U chassis. This server has 4 sticks of DDR3 UDIMMS and a choice of Hard Disc Drives (2×3.5” or 4×2.5”). Since this PowerEdge C5125 has shared infrastructure it consumes little floor space, power and cooling. Power supplies, interconnect, and servers are all cold-aisle accessible and you can even hot-swap the server nodes.

So now that you have seen the stats, what kind of game do you think the PowerEdge C5125 is geared towards?  This server is a hyperscale-inspired building block for dedicated hosting and Web 2.0 environments where power and density is key.  This rookie has a great future in the datacenter.  Let us know what you think.

Jeff Jones is a Global Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

First, I was in Buenos Aires last week (finally a vacation!) and it was actually fall down there, the leaves are turning and falling, kids are heading back to school, and everyone is gearing up for the colder weather ahead.

Secondly, Dell has just introduced the new Dell PowerEdge™ C5125 server.  This new server is actually a multiple server chassis that has “sleds”, each holding a single 1P server based on an AMD Phenom™ processor.

The chassis is only 3U high, giving the total solution the ability to host 12 individual servers in a 3U, or ¼ of a U per server.

Now, in a world of virtualization, who would want such a server when you could host multiple servers in a virtualized environment?  Well, I can think of a few.  ISPs, hosting services, dedicated infrastructure servers or cloud deployments come to mind quickly.

In space constrained data centers where customers are still utilizing dedicated hardware for network infrastructure, a solution like this can more than double the server density of traditional blade solutions that pack up to 12 blades in a 7U chassis.

Today, many businesses are looking to ISPs and hosting services to host servers on their remote premises because of the high cost of data centers, from both a real estate and a power and cooling perspective.  In these cases, virtualization is not an option, they require dedicated servers. So a dense solution with plenty of 1P servers can help minimize the footprint in the rack as well as minimize the power and cooling requirements.

Did someone say cool?  Sure, that is the third reason I am thinking of sleigh bells – cool data centers.  These new solutions from Dell help minimize the amount of power being consumed per server.  These servers are powered by processors with TDPs as low as 25W.

Finally, to wrap up all of this, we can’t end the conversation without the standard “cloud” word.  In cloud workloads, customers are looking for the ability to not only ramp compute scalability to handle the spikes in cloud workloads, but are also looking for the ability to systematically scale their cloud out as their workloads grow.  What better way to do this than with a module platform like the Dell PowerEdge C5125?  The ability to simply plug in more compute capacity as needs grow is a snap with such a modular platform.  Installing multiple 12-servers chassis with some slots open would be an easy task and allow for the addition of more servers in minutes, not days or weeks.  And with a 3U total height in the rack, even chassis that are not fully populated are not wasting as much rack space as a blade chassis might. This allows for maximization of rack storage space while still allowing for easy expandability for future capacity.

So, combined together, the net effect is a scalable chassis with flexible low power servers that can easily grow to meet your computing needs.  Just in time for the cool weather, depending on which hemisphere you are in, of course.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites, and references to third party trademarks, are provided for convenience and illustrative purposes only.  Unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such links, and no third party endorsement of AMD or any of its products is implied.

What questions would I try to answer for customers? Does the Dell/AMD roster have the right blend of speed and performance? Is the Dell/AMD roster built with core fundamentals that customer can build a foundation with? Who is Dell/AMD’s MVP candidate, why are Dell/AMD my “go to products” in the clutch?

Here it goes-

Hello, I’m Armando Acosta, coming to you live from the Dell/AMD studios in Austin, TX. Today’s top news story is customers are still searching for “go to products” for building out their hyper scale-out computing environments.

For customers seeking a hyper scale server with outstanding performance per watt per dollar with power, space, weight and budget constrained data center environments, the Dell PowerEdge C6105 fits the bill. The AMD-based PowerEdge C6105 is a 4-node 2U shared infrastructure 2-socket server providing the ideal balance of power, price and performance required for scale-out computing. Your operating dollars go further when you reduce energy use by up to 29% over previous AMD processor generations¹.  Sports fans, you can take that to the bank.

Customers looking to maximize compute, memory, and I/O density per rack for massively parallel applications, Dell/AMD have the MVP-Most Valuable Performance, the Dell PowerEdge C6145. The Dell PowerEdge C6145 is ranked as the highest performing x86 2U shared infrastructure server on the market.²

In addition, the PowerEdge C6145 with up to 96 cores, 1TB of memory and 10 PCIe slots, can deliver up to a 509 percent better price per performance at a fifth of cost and a quarter of the rack space when compared to the previous top score, the HP ProLiant DL980 G7.³ What can you say about that kind of performance? It’s Awesome, baby! With a capital “A”!

Dell and AMD are teaming up to develop specific, customer focused products based on their workload needs.

Make the Dell PowerEdge C6105/C6145 with AMD Opteron^TM 4000/6000 Series processors your “go to product” in the clutch.

Armando Acosta is Data Center Solutions Product Manager at Dell. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s or Dell’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD and Dell are not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied

The results above reflect SPECpower_ssj results for the best performing 2P servers using AMD Opteron processor models 4164 EE and 2419 EE published on www.spec.org as of March 16, 2011.. 126W and 409096 ssj_ops at 100% of target load and 2106 overall ssj_ops/watt using 2 x AMD Opteron processor Model 4164 EE vs. 178W and 406954 ssj_ops at 100% of target load and 1614 overall ssj_ops/watt using 2 x AMD Opteron™ processor Model 2419 EE.

2The results above reflect SPECfp®_rate 2006 results published on http://www.spec.org/cpu2006/results/res2011q1/cpu2006-20110214-14557.html as of March 3, 2011, which show that the Dell PowerEdge C6145 is the highest performing x86 2U server. Configuration: 1310 using 8 x AMD Opteron™ processors Model 6180 SE in Dell PowerEdge C6145 server, 128GB (32 x 4GB DDR3-1333) memory, SuSE Linux® Enterprise Server 11 64-bit, x86 Open64 4.2.4 Compiler Suite.

3 Based on results for 8-chip x86 servers published on www.spec.org as of March 15, 2011, the Dell PowerEdge C6145 in 2U form factor achieved a SPECfp®_rate2006 score of 1310 while the HP ProLiant DL980 G7 in 8U form factor achieved a SPECfp®_rate2006 score of 1150.  Actual performance will vary based on configuration, usage and manufacturing variability.  HP ProLiant priced at $133,544 with a performance score of 1150 and price/performance of $116.13 vs the Dell PowerEdge C6145 priced at $24,997.42 with a performance score of 1310 and price/performance of $19.08.  (116.13-19.08)/19.08 = 509% better price performance.  

SPEC, SPECpower_sjj, and SPECfp are registered trademarks of the Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation.  For the latest SPECfp®_rate2006 and SPECpower_sjj^TM2008 benchmark results, visit http://www.spec.org.

At AMD and Dell, we realize becoming a champion is much easier said than done. In fact, the “madness” can feel very real. Choosing the right server comes with a laundry of list of complexities and factors you must weigh. So, while we’re embracing the madness this March, we’re also hoping to help you conquer the madness.

And, for a sneak peek into what we’re talking about, look no further than the CRN review that says the AMD-powered Dell C6145 has performance that is “off the charts,” while Mike Vizard of CTO Edge recognizes that the C6145 “packs an AMD punch.” It’s those kinds of attributes that we are building our team around – providing you with the solutions necessary to beat the madness and deliver value to your business. Stay tuned to AMD at Work for a whole lot about this over the next few weeks.

Jeff Jones is a Global Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Sure, I’m biased, I believe that the AMD Opteron™ processor is the best processor technology for the server market, but the lawyers can get jumpy when I try to say that in a blog and they generally ask for me to say things like “in my opinion…” at the start of those sentences. 

Well this one is for the lawyers:  “The AMD Opteron processor is the best processor of the year for parallel processing.”

While I believe that this is true, I don’t have to attribute this to me because there are others that feel the same way.  Infoworld chose the AMD Opteron 6100 as the best CPU in 2010 for parallel processing.

Clearly, when it comes to processing large amounts of data and running in virtualized environments that are always core-dependent, we have designed a processor that can handle the load, and excel to be the best product of the year for those workloads.

Now, wouldn’t you assume that if you put the best CPU of the year into a server, it should make it the best server of the year?  I would surely believe so, but, again, our lawyers might get a little nervous if I say that.  So I will let someone else make that claim.

“The Dell PowerEdge R815, powered by the AMD Opteron 6100 series processor is the best server of the year.”

Again, this one is not me with my potentially biased opinions, but actually from CRN who choses the PowerEdge R815 as the best server of the year.

I have blogged a lot about the PowerEdge R815, it is one of my favorite topics because of the great performance, huge core scalability and the fact that it delivers it all in only 2U of rack space.  48 cores in 2U is an impressive feat when competing solutions require multiple servers taking up much more valuable rack space to reach the same core counts.

This has definitely been a great year for AMD and its partners and it is great to get the recognition that I have always believed that these products would deliver.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIbtzWYF6XY

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server, Embedded and FireStream products at AMD.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

http://searchdatacenter.techtarget.com/news/2240025618/Processor-technology-for-Unix-systems-AMD-or-Intel

Some highlights include:

“Magny-Cours was a big step for AMD, and server manufacturers have responded. Dell, for example, released the PowerEdge R815 rack server geared toward lowering hardware costs and attracting Unix administrators. With AMD processors installed, the server is designed to deliver up to 48 processor cores (using four 12-core processors).”

“HP also released its new line of ProLiant machines that utilize the new 12-core AMD line. The ProLiant DL585 G7 and ProLiant BL465c G7 server blades come with the 12-core processor installed. The server blade is capable of handling two 12-core AMD 6100-series processors with up to 256 GB of allocated RAM. By comparison, the DL585 uses up to four 12-core Opteron chips and can handle up to 512 GB of DDR3 RAM.”

“More memory is critical for supporting more VMs on a physical host system. AMD’s 6100 Opteron Series has four DDR3 memory channels versus three in Intel’s Xeon 5600, meaning a larger memory footprint. At three memory DIMMs per channel, for example, a Xeon can handle a maximum of nine DIMM slots per socket, but the new Opteron 6000 Series platform can handle 12.”

“With all of these additional cores and capabilities now at the administrator’s disposal, Unix environments and Windows shops can manage their data centers in a more efficient, blade-style environment. Admins initially hesitant to migrate or virtualize their Unix-based databases can now do so with more confidence. Data center administrators have the hardware resources available, giving them more control over data management and resource distribution.”

Have you followed all 10 days of the 12 Days of 12 Core so far? We’re about to unleash a Toshiba laptop on our winner. Check out the rules here.

Jason Deal is a PR Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I am excited for the transition from VMmark 1 to VMmark 2. VMmark 1 was initially released in 2007 when the focus of virtualization centered on the consolidation of infrastructure workloads.  The intent of VMmark was to give a look at the number of Virtual Machines (VMs) that could run on a particular server. To achieve this, VMmark would stack up many lightly loaded VMs until the server became saturated. With today’s multi-core technology, like the 12-Core AMD Opteron™ 6100 Series processor, a VMmark score may have hundreds of VMs on a server.

But here is the rub – in real life you are more likely to run 10 – 20 VMs on a server, not hundreds. From my point of view, “one VM per core” is a pretty standard “rule of thumb” for most virtual environments.

As virtualization evolves more focus will be placed on running “real world workloads” – applications like web serving and database that can carry heavy disk and network loads. The lightly loaded VMs of VMmark 1 just don’t do a good job of approximating this environment.

Benchmarks only provide a look at performance for a very specific environment.

One of the issues often raised about VMmark is the fact that it only evaluates raw performance and does not take into consideration system price or power consumption.  In my experience, end users evaluate more than just performance – they evaluate the the cost and power consumption of servers for their virtualized environments as well. How these parameter balance is often a key factor in the buy decision.

Let’s take a farewell look at some recent VMmark 1.1.1 results.

The VMmark score line in the chart above is the “raw performance” of the system, as determined by the WMmark testing (a full description of the testing and the systems can be found by clicking on the link above). I have added a cost for each system using HP’s and Dell’s on-line system configurators and server specifications listed in the benchmark submission documents. A price per VM was calculated by dividing the system cost by the number of VMs. Both the AMD-based HP ProLiant DL 385 G7 and the Dell PowerEdge R815 systems offer excellent system costs compared to competitive configuration. And even though the competitive systems posted higher raw performance scores, AMD-based systems really shine in price per VM.

Note how the Dell PowerEdge R815 showcases our concept of a value 4P. One the one hand, compare the PowerEdge R815 to the competitive 4P system (the PowerEdge R910).  The R910 provides about 20% more raw performance, but at more than double the system cost. At the same time, the R815 is also lower cost and higher performance than the competitive 2P system (the R810). And in terms of price per VM – the R815 has the lowest cost of any system. Now that is Simply Spectacular Virtualization!

We need to give VMware a lot of credit for taking a leadership role in addressing the challenge of virtualization benchmarking. The first generation of VMmark has taught us all a lot about benchmarking virtualized environments – and has made a good topic for many blogs. Looking forward to VMmark 2!

What are your thoughts on VMmark and benchmarking virtualized environments?

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

¹ Pricing obtained from www.hp.com and www.dell.com, respectively, using their online configuration tools.  Systems specifications matched those described in the VMmark testing.  Pricing accurate as of August 18, 2010.

Virtualization has only added to this.  Consider just one part of the issue, what constitutes a relevant virtualization benchmark?  In our opinion, a relevant virtualization benchmark should include a combination of different workloads with differing characteristics running on an increasing number of virtual machines.  This approach will sufficiently stress the hardware and the software stack to determine what we think will be the optimal configuration for performance and efficiency.

Up until now, VMware’s VMmark benchmark has been the industry’s adopted standard for measuring performance of the VMware hypervisor.  I’ve shared with you before my assessment of VMmark and its limited application to real-world environments, and I’ve shown where different methodologies can and will produce vastly different results.  In the end, when analyzing performance, the answer is often the dreaded “it depends”.

We now have another viable option to assess and plan for our virtualization environment.  On Wednesday, July 14^th, SPEC released the first hypervisor-neutral virtualization benchmark for servers, which measures performance, power consumption and the relationships between power and performance.   According to SPEC, SPECvirt_sc2010 uses a realistic workload and SPEC’s performance and power measurement methodologies to enable vendors, users and researchers to compare systems performance across multiple hardware configs, virtualization platforms, and applications. The fact that SPECvirt is “vendor neutral” in terms of the hypervisor is a real plus for customers who are trying to evaluate all aspects of the virtualization platform. It also shows the maturation of the virtualization market to include competitive offerings from major software vendors like Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware.

SPECvirt_sc2010 was developed by the SPEC virtualization subcommittee of which AMD was a key contributor, along with many other of our partners like Dell, HP and VMware.  This new benchmark modified several existing SPEC workloads; SPECweb2005, SPECjAppServer2004, and SPECmail2008, all common targets of virtualization, to match a typical server consolidation scenario such as CPU resource requirements, memory, disk I/O and network utilization. 

AMD is proud to have been a part of the development and release SPECvirt_sc2010 and we look forward to seeing it evolve in the industry.  We believe the addition of a power metric and the ability to analyze power/performance relationships at both the server and the system level is big step forward in the area of virtualization benchmarking.

SPECvirt_sc2010 doesn’t come free.  A license can be obtained from SPEC for $3000. Membership in SPEC is open to any interested company or entity that is willing to commit to SPEC’s standards.  More information is available at http://www.spec.org/virt_sc2010/.   

So where does this leave VMmark?  Only time will tell.  Have you looked at SPECvirt_2010?  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Tim Mueting is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

But occasionally we hear “but I don’t need that many cores.”  Of course, there are always going to be environments where 2P is all you need – after all, around 75% of the market is 2P, so there is definitely going to be a need for those platforms.

Well Dell has now brought out a solution for their customers that want the performance of 12-core AMD Opteron™ processors but may not need the full 32 or 48 cores that can come in a 4P system.

The new Dell PowerEdge R715 is the little brother of the PowerEdge R815, bringing a 2P design to the PowerEdge portfolio.  Balanced for consolidation, virtualization, database, and general business applications, the Dell PowerEdge R715 server offers great price for performance with up to 24 processor cores and 16 DIMM slots.

And if you are a Dell customer, you might already be utilizing the R815 for your computing workloads.  You’ll find an amazing amount of commonality between the R815 and the R715, which should help reduce servicing and management activities. The little brother shares a lot of DNA with its bigger brother and the resemblance goes beyond the face (the system bezel).  You’ll find all of the service spares, external ports and component locations are common across the systems, as well as a lot of the system software (including advanced systems management capabilities).

The system can accommodate either an AMD SR5670 and SR5650 chipset to help drive more I/O expandability.  The 2U chassis has plenty of expandability with 6 PCIe gen 2 slots, a storage controller slot, as well as internal dual SD card slots for added redundancy at the hypervisor level. And those two chipset I/O hubs help make sure that data is moving rapidly, so even heavy workloads get an extra boost.

And when you look at the value of this platform relative to other 2P platforms in the market, the case for the PowerEdge R715 gets even stronger.  There are plenty of applications in the data center where this platform can find a home, so it is really worth taking a look at Dell’s latest offering.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products at AMD.  His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Many providers are trying to join the virtualization discussion by simply focusing on the components of the technology. However, VMware is taking a different approach by keeping the focus on you, the customer. AMD, along with its hardware partner Dell, is proud to sponsor VMware Express and showcase PowerEdge servers featuring AMD Opteron™ processor technology.

Here’s a list of upcoming locations where you can see AMD and Dell live and in-person.

• May 26: Scottsdale
• June 4: Houston
• June 16: Nashville
• June 22: Dallas / Ft Worth

Be sure to check the website for additional information as the tour progresses: www.vmware.com/tour

The VMware Express is a great way to get educated about the many performance, efficiency and security benefits of virtualization and cloud computing. By boarding the VMware Express, you can gain:

• Hands-on experience with VMware’s award-winning desktop virtualization and cloud computing solutions in real-world scenarios.
• Insight from technical experts about the benefits that virtualization and cloud computing solutions can provide to specific businesses, from the desktop through the datacenter, and to the cloud.
• Access to five demo stations that illustrate VMware desktop and server solutions, including VMware View™, VMware vSphere™ and the VMware vCenter™ family of products.

You might also want to take a look at a success story that showcases the City of Austin and their use of Dell PowerEdge Servers running AMD Opteron processors with VMware ESX to help prune power and cooling requirements while boosting testing and development capabilities.

Virtualization and cloud computing have relevance for businesses of all sizes.  Before making an investment in these technologies, however, take a few minutes to kick the tires and test drive available solutions. We hope to see you soon at a location near you.

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD. Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I make my living here at AMD as a social media strategist. For those of you who don’t know what that means (which is probably everyone) I am basically a web guy in marketing clothes. My day-to-day work involves a lot of multitasking:

• Communication –  Outlook, Communicator, GTalk, TweetDeck, Facebook
• Web development  –  SFTP, Dreamweaver, Photoshop
• Publishing  –  WordPress, YouTube, Flikr
• Measurement & analysis – Radian6,  Excel, Calculator (don’t laugh, I’m a nerd)

The result: carpal tunnel from a lot of ALT+TAB and wasted time waiting for apps to load. It’s easy to see then why a guy like me would really need a three-monitor desktop experience.

The truth is there are several of us out there who need this kind of multitasking flexibility. My social media brethren know all too well what I am talking about here. Notebook computing is great on the go but its limitation is and probably always will be screen real-estate. For people who just need email and web, that is fine solution. Once you go beyond those basic tasks your computing experience tends to suffer. Hence the need for a desktop or workstation to do the heavy lifting.

The traditional barrier to multi-monitor nirvana has been price. I recognize many of you in the small, medium or single-proprietor business are on limited budgets and additional IT tools are a “nice to have” at best. As a result, a multi-monitor workstation that goes into the many thousands of dollars is simply not an option. We have made do with two monitors where possible, or like I did until yesterday, just put up with whatever our laptop could deliver on a 13” to 17” screen.

Enter my new desktop, powered by an AMD Phenom™ II X4 945 processor and an ATI Radeon™ HD 5750 graphics card. Now what would this harbinger-of-enhanced-productivity set you back in the real world if you bought it today?

• Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 945 3.0Ghz – $152.99
• Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-790FXTA-UD5 – $184.99
• Memory: CORSAIR 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 – $109.99
• Eyefinity Graphics Card: XFX HD-575X-ZNFC Radeon HD 5750 1GB 128-bit GDDR5 – $139.99
• Hard Drive: HITACHI Deskstar HD31000 IDK/7K (0S00163) 1TB 7200 RPM - $79.99
• Case: Antec VSK-2000 Black ATX Mid Tower Computer Case – $39.99

Desktop subtotal: $707.94*

Attached to this beast I have 3 Dell P2310H 23” Widescreen (1920×1080) LCDs which are currently going for $249 each on Dell.com. That’s a monitor subtotal of $747.*

How much did it cost AMD to outfit me with a desktop that supports ATI Eyefinity technology?

$1454.94* plus taxes, shipping, etc.

I could have saved some dollars by going with a different motherboard but this is basically the price point you are looking at for a system like this. Let’s see you hit that price point with your fancy-pants, fruit-stamped, single-monitor  workstation!

But I don’t want a new desktop! I just want the ability to use multiple monitors simultaneously. How much would it cost me to UPGRADE my current system to support ATI Eyefinity technology?

The important thing to remember about ATI Eyefinity is that it is a graphics-based technology.  Sound obvious but it’s worth noting. Essentially all the hardware you need to get your current desktop graphics to where mine is today is as follows:

• 1 ATI Radeon™ HD 5750 card that supports ATI Eyefinity technology
• 2 or more monitors (assuming you have one DVI monitor already)
• At least one monitor needs to support a DisplayPort connection or have the dongle converting DVI to DisplayPort

Based on that criteria and the pricing info I used above, your cost to upgrade your system to support an ATI Eyefinity display setup is:

$639.99* plus taxes, shipping, etc.

Now we are talking. You probably spend that much on caramel macchiatos per year!

You have me interested, but what will I do with all of that screen real estate??

So let’s put aside the price and go back to the reasons why you should want or even demand ATI Eyefinity for your job. Let me paint you a picture of this multi-tasking utopia on my desk. Now, pretend you are me for a minute (frightening, yes?).

Imagine…a desk.

All of a sudden, three monitors appear lined up in front of you in portrait orientation.  After you turn each one on to start working, you see all of the information you need laid out in front of you on one, large 3240×1920 desktop.

Your Task: Write a blog post about how ATI Eyefinity technology is used in the workplace. Here is what you might see:

Left-most monitor:

• Top half: Google Chrome with tabs open for Facebook, news articles and webmail
• Bottom half: Internet Explorer with tabs open researching prices for all of the components in this desktop

Center Monitor:

• Top half: MS Word 2010 where you are authoring this blog post
• Bottom half: Google Chrome with tabs open for posting this blog in WordPress when it’s finished, and YouTube where you are reviewing comments on our latest videos

Right-most Monitor:

• Fullscreen: You have TweetDeck open where you are checking in on your network in real-time, monitoring the competition’s tweets and looking for which party you should attend at SXSWi next weekend.

Without ALT+TABing or closing a single app you researched, wrote and published this blog post – all while being a single click from email and other tasks – and you didn’t miss a tweet in the process.

Impressive, no?

Note to Slackers:

This thing also owns in 3D games and plays back HD video like a dream. Something I personally would never, ever, ever do while at work. Ever. [wink]

Am I insane to have a job that requires this much multitasking? Probably. Are you insane to try and do this job without ATI Eyefinity technology? Absolutely.

Slow down there cowboy! I’m not a social media nutcase like you. Why should I care about ATI Eyefinity technology?

A sane question from a sane person to be sure. Well there is more to this story than just using it for communication & networking. In fact, there are about as many ways to make ATI Eyefinity work for you as there are ways to set up 3, 4, 5 or even 6 monitors to our graphics cards. Here are a few examples off the top of my head:

• Stock trader
• Video editor
• Web developer
• Graphic designer
• [insert your job here]

Over the next few weeks, I will seek out real-world ATI Eyefinity users and ask them how they use their multi-monitor systems at work.  You get to sit back and just take it all in. Are you excited yet?

Until next time, how would YOU use ATI Eyefinity technology at work? Leave me a comment. I dare you to multitask more than me!

*Note about the prices. They were taken from newegg.com and dell.com on Friday, February 26^th, 2010 and may not reflect the component prices available in your area.

Chris James is the Social Media Strategist for AMD’s Global Communications team. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

The first box is big. Really big. Ripping off the paper I see it’s a brand new Sun X4640 8P server with Six-Core AMD Opteron™ processors. This new server is in the spotlight because of two of the new benchmarks that were just released this week. New records for SPECompL®2001 and SAP 2-tier Sales and Distribution benchmarks show the great performance of this 48-core platform. As a great platform for enterprise class business applications and consolidation, this is one worth checking out.

Don’t you hate having to track down batteries for your gifts?  Why can’t they be more power efficient?  Well, at PRACE (Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe), they deployed a cluster based on the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors, specifically, our 8000 series.  Utilizing a new 4P SuperMicro blade platform that features the new AMD 5600 series chipsets, the blade chassis are capable of supporting 10 blades, which results in 240 cores per 7U chassis. This case study shows how PRACE utilized our technology, along with SuperMicro blades, to solve their supercomputing challenges.

When looking for that perfect gift, many of us gravitate to the internet, that series of tubes that gives us all of the data that we need every day.  This morning I was reading Infoworld’s review of the Dell PowerEdge 805 and 905 servers.

“In our tests, we find that the performance has greatly improved. Further, the price of the R805 has come down significantly. As a result, the price-performance ratio, always a strength of Dell’s product lines, is hugely better than it was a year ago. In addition, power consumption is vastly improved for both models. It’s hard to recall so much progress made in three different areas in any year-over-year hardware comparisons.”

So, compared to systems based on our previous quad-core processors from just last year, these Dell servers offer greater performance (expected when comparing 4-core to 6-core) but also lower price and better power consumption.  That sounds like great performance-per-watt-per-dollar to me, which is my favorite holiday song.

Now, time to clean up the wrapping paper, get another cup of coffee and get back to work, because, after all, we have a pretty big package to wrap up for Q1 and all the cool kids are putting that on their wish list for 2010.

John Fruehe is the Director of Product Marketing for Server/Workstation products at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

We ran a full slate of theater presentations in the AMD Booth and, from what I saw, every session was standing room only.   This year we were treated to two customer presentations – Scott Ramnitz from First Data Corporation and Michael Foltz of Kroger Co. – two long time AMD customers and early adopters of virtualization shared their experiences. 

In addition to Scott and Michael, on Tuesday Steve Pope, CTO of Solarflare Communications discussed the performance challenges that virtualization presents for I/O Devices.  Solarflare is a leading silicon vendor delivering products that enable the rapid adoption of 10 Gigabit Ethernet for data center and enterprise networks.  Along with Solarflare and VMware, we demonstrated near native performance of AMD’s I/O virtualization technology on an AMD engineering development system featuring 4 twelve-core AMD Opteron 6100 series processors (codenamed “Magny-Cours”) and four AMD SR5690 chipsets running  VMware ESX 4.0 and Solarflare’s 10GeB NIC. Please note that the AMD Opteron^TM 6100 series processors, code-named “Magny-Cours,” referenced below are scheduled to be launched in the first quarter of 2010.

On Wednesday, Ron Graham, Technical Marketing Manager from Sun lead a discussion on virtualization performance on AMD Opteron^TM processor based Sun servers like the 8-socket Sun Fire X4600 M2 server and then again on Thursday Ron returned to discuss Sun’s AMD Opteron^TM processor-based Sun Storage 7000 Unified Storage Systems that deliver mission-critical entry storage. One of the most popular sessions of the week was given by Simon Crosby, CTO of Virtualization for Citrix Corporation.  Simon didn’t mince words while giving us his unique perspective on the state of virtualization today and what he believes we can expect in the future in his talk entitled  ”Cloud Computing and Desktop Virtualization.”  AMD continues our close work with Citrix on XenServer and XenApp and supported the Introduction of Xen Cloud Platform to help accelerate customer adoption of open enterprise-class cloud infrastructures.

Also on Thursday Armando Acosta, Product Manager from Dell presented “Dell Solutions to Power the Efficient Enterprise.”   Armando discussed Dell’s AMD Opteron^TM processor-based blade and rack server solutions designed specifically for virtualization and the enterprise, including the Dell PowerEdge 905 server which took home a 2009 InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award

For those of you who didn’t have a chance to attend one of these sessions or would like to revisit the slides you can see them here (along with a host of other information) at the AMD Booth on VMworld.com.  Also check out the latest AMD Virtualization Update by AMD’s Director of Commercial Solutions, Margaret Lewis.

All-in-all it was another successful event for AMD.  As virtualization is hitting mainstream AMD has released a full line of Six-Core AMD Opteron^TM processors that provides superior value for your most important virtualization workloads.  Don’t just take my word for it, according to a recent blog post at Solori that analyzes price/performance for 2-socket servers – “Istanbul continues to offer a 20-30% CAPEX value proposition against Nehalem in the virtualization use case…”

Tim Mueting is a Product Marketing Manager at AMD. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

I’m excited today to tell you about a virtualization webinar that AMD recently hosted with valued hardware partner, Dell.  A few years ago Dell and AMD collaborated to create some of the industry’s first servers optimized for virtualization — the Dell PowerEdge R805 and R905 rack servers. In fact, earlier this year the Dell PowerEdge R905 won an InfoWorld Technology of the Year Award for Best Virtualization Server. Since then, we’ve continued to work together to fine-tune virtualization and are now expanding our efforts to reach SMBs — a rapidly growing area for virtualization.

In this Webinar, “Optimal Virtualization with AMD, Dell and Microsoft,” I join Antonio Sanchez, Senior Server Product Manager in Dell’s SMB segment to discuss the hot topic of virtualization for small and mid-sized business.  We understand that many small businesses looking to utilize virtualization have questions.  This session offers valuable information about how the software, hardware and processor technology must all work together to provide a superior virtualization solution.  As you all know, that’s what I’m all about – the magic between the software and the hardware – and Dell and AMD are working hard with software partners like Microsoft to make that magic happen. 

This is a must-listen for all you SMBs IT managers thinking about virtualization. Be sure to listen in and if it sparks any thoughts or questions, leave me a comment.

Margaret Lewis, director, AMD commercial software and solutions

Margaret Lewis (@margaretjlewis) is a Product Marketing Director at AMD.

Her postings are her own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

@margaretjlewis

Virtualization is one of the most effective ways for companies to improve server utilization and improve data center efficiency. A few years ago Dell and AMD collaborated to create some of the industry’s first servers optimized for virtualization, the Dell PowerEdge R805 and R905 rack servers. The PowerEdge R905 based on the AMD Opteron processor is a great example of how we’ve fine-tuned our servers to provide virtualization performance. It is an ideal formula of processor technology, massive memory capacity and I/O scalability.

Our customers adopting the new Istanbul platform will see even greater virtualization performance with the new Istanbul processors. In fact, our initial benchmarks show a whopping 38 percent improvement in virtualization performance. We expect to continue to have industry-leading benchmarks for 4 socket servers with Istanbul.

With previous generations of AMD Opteron processors, we have had demand from companies with large data centers that have space and power constraints and from companies that need high availability for large databases. We have good news for these companies: the performance per watt equation just got better. The Six-Core AMD Opteron processors pack tremendous performance increases – we are seeing chart-popping 61 percent increases on SPECint benchmarks – into the same power consumption parameters.

Customers can get six-core performance in the same footprint as with Quad-Core AMD Opteron processors to run the most compute intensive applications and scale higher while conserving energy. Our customers can get improved performance in I/O intensive applications like databases and technical computing without taking up more floor space, and still operating in the same power envelope. We are pleased to offer companies in industries like high performance computing for geosciences, oil and gas exploration, life sciences and research the AMD technology-based systems they need for performance intensive virtualized applications.

Congratulations AMD on the successful, and early, launch of the Six-Core AMD Opteron processors.

 Armando Acosta is product manager for Dell PowerEdge servers. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Any claims made herein are based on Dell testing and have not been independently verified by AMD. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.